Strategic Monkeywrenching

by Dave Forman (1985)

Taken from Chapter 1 of the seminal Ecodefense: A Field Guide to Monkeywrenching, edited by Dave Foreman and "Bill Haywood."

In early summer of 1977, the
United States Forest Service began an 18 month-long inventory and evaluation of
the remaining roadless and undeveloped areas on the National Forests and
Grasslands of the United States. During this second Roadless Area Review and
Evaluation (RARE II), the Forest Service identified 2,686 roadless areas of
5,000 acres or more totaling 66 million acres out of the 187 million acres of
National Forest lands. Approximately 15 million acres of roadless areas were
not included in RARE II because of sloppy inventory procedures or because they
had already gone through land use planning after the first RARE program in the
early '70s. All in all, there were some 80 million acres on the National
Forests in 1977 retaining a significant degree of natural diversity and
wildness (a total area equivalent in size to the state of New Mexico or a
square 350 x 350 miles).

About
the same time as the Forest Service began RARE II, the Bureau of Land
Management (BLM) initiated a wilderness inventory as required by the Federal
Land Planning and Management Act of 1976 (FLPMA) on the 189 million acres of
federal land that they manage in the lower 48 states. In their initial
Inventory, BLM identified 60 million acres of roadless areas of 5,000 acres or
more (a total area approximately the size of Oregon or a square 300 x 300
miles).

Along with the National Parks and Monuments, National Wildlife
Refuges, existing Wilderness Areas, and some state lands, these Forest Service
and BLM roadless areas represent the remaining natural wealth of the United States (though much of the roadless acreage inventoried in the 1970s has
been butchered). They are the remnant of natural diversity after the industrial
conquest of the most beautiful, diverse, and productive of all the continents
of the Earth: North America. Turtle Island.

Only 150 years ago, the Great Plains were a vast, waving sea
of grass stretching from the Chihuahuan Desert of Mexico to the boreal forest
of Canada, from the oak-hickory forests of the Ozarks to the Rocky Mountains.
Bison blanketed the plains-it has been estimated that 60 million of the huge,
shaggy beasts moved across the grassy ocean in seasonal migrations. Throngs of Pronghorn and Elk also filled this Pleistocene landscape. Packs
of Gray Wolves and numerous Grizzly Bears followed the tremendous herds.

In 1830, John James Audubon sat on the banks of the Ohio
River for three days as a single flock of Passenger Pigeons
darkened the sky from horizon to horizon. He estimated that there were several billion birds in that flock. It has been
said that a squirrel could travel from the Atlantic seaboard to the Mississippi
River without touching the ground so dense was the deciduous forest of the
East.

At the time of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, an estimated
100,000 Grizzlies roamed the western half of what is now the United States.
The howl of the wolf was ubiquitous. The California Condor
sailed the sky from the Pacific Coast to the Great Plains. Salmon and sturgeon
populated the rivers. Ocelots, Jaguars, and Jaguarundis prowled the Texas brush
and Southwestern mountains and mesas. Bighorn Sheep ranged the mountains of
the Rockies, the Great Basin, the Southwest, and the Pacific Coast.
Ivory-billed Woodpeckers and Carolina Parakeets filled the steamy forests of
the Deep South. The land was alive.

East of the Mississippi, giant Tulip Poplars, American Chestnuts,
oaks, hickories, and other trees formed the most diverse temperate deciduous
forest in the world. In New England, White Pines grew to heights rivaling the
Brobdingnagian conifers of the far West. On the Pacific Coast, redwood,
hemlock, Douglas-fir, spruce, cedar, fir, and pine formed the grandest forest
on Earth.

In the space of a
few generations we have laid
waste to paradise. The Tallgrass Prairie has been transformed into a corn
factory where wildlife means the exotic pheasant. The Shortgrass Prairie is a
grid of carefully fenced cow pastures and wheatfields. The Passenger Pigeon is
no more; the last one died in the Cincinnati Zoo in 1914. The endless forests
of the East are tame woodlots. With few exceptions, the only virgin deciduous
forest there is in tiny museum pieces of hundreds of acres. Fewer than one
thousand Grizzlies remain. The last three condors left in the wild were
captured and imprisoned in the Los Angeles Zoo. (An expensive reintroduction
effort has since been started.) Except in northern Minnesota and northwestern
Montana, wolves are known as scattered individuals drifting across the Canadian
and Mexican borders. Four percent of the peerless Redwood Forest remains and
the ancient forests of Oregon are all but gone. The tropical cats have been
shot and poisoned from our Southwestern borderlands. The subtropical Eden of
Florida has been transmogrified into hotels and citrus orchards. Domestic
cattle have grazed bare and radically altered the composition of the grassland
communities of the West, displacing Elk, Moose, Bighorn Sheep, and Pronghom and
leading to the virtual extermination of Grizzly Bear, Gray Wolf, Cougar, and
other "varmints." Dams choke most of the continent's rivers and
streams.

Nonetheless, wildness and natural diversity remain. There
are a few scattered grasslands ungrazed, stretches of free-flowing river,
thousand-year-old forests, Eastern woodlands growing back to forest and
reclaiming past roads, Grizzlies and wolves and lions and Wolverines and
Bighorn and Moose roaming the backcountry; hundreds of square miles that have
never known the imprint of a tire, the bite of a drill, the rip of a 'dozer,
the cut of a saw, the smell of gasoline.

These are the places that hold North America together, that contain the genetic
information of life, that represent sanity in a whirlwind of madness.

In January of 1979, the Forest Service announced the results
of RARE II: Of 80 million acres of undeveloped lands on the National Forests,
only 15 million acres were recommended for protection against logging, road
building, and other developments. In the big-tree state of Oregon, for example,
only 370,000 acres were proposed for Wilderness protection out of 4.5 million
acres of roadless, uncut forest lands. Of the areas nationally slated for
protection, most were too high, too dry, too cold, too steep to offer much in
the way of "resources" to the loggers, miners, and graziers. Most
roadless old-growth forest was allocated to the sawmill. Important Grizzly
habitat in the Northern Rockies was tossed to the oil industry and the loggers.
Off-road-vehicle dervishes and the landed gentry of the livestock industry won
out in the Southwest and Great Basin.

During the early 1980s, the
Forest Service developed its DARN (Development Activities in Roadless
Non-selected) list, outlining specific projects in particular roadless areas.
DARN's implications are staggering. The list is evidence that the leadership of
the United States Forest Service consciously and deliberately sat down and
asked themselves, "How can we keep from being plagued by conservationists
and their damned wilderness proposals?
How can we insure that we'll never have to do another RARE?" Their
solution was simple: Get rid of the roadless areas. In its earliest form, DARN
projected nine thousand miles of road, one and a half million acres of timber cuts, 7 million acres of oil and gas leases in National Forest RARE II
areas before 1987. More recent figures from the Forest Service are far more
disturbing: The agency plans over half a
million miles of new road, and up to 100,000 miles of this will be in roadless
areas! In most cases, the damaged acreage will be far greater than the
acreage stated, because the roads are designed to split undeveloped areas in
half, and timber sales are engineered to take place in the center of roadless
areas, thereby devastating the biological integrity of the larger area. The
great roadless areas so critical to the maintenance of natural diversity will
soon be gone. Species dependent on old growth and large wild areaswill be shoved to the brink of extinction.

The BLM Wilderness Review has
been a similar process of attrition. It is unlikely that more than 9 million
acres will be designated as Wilderness out of the 60 million with which the
review began. Again, it is the more scenic but biologically less rich areas
that will be proposed for protection.

By 1990, Congress had passed
legislation designating minimal National Forest Wilderness acreages for most
states (generally only slightly larger than the pitiful RARE II recommendations
and concentrating on "rocks and ice" instead of crucial forested
lands). In the next few years, similar picayune legislation for National Forest
Wilderness in the remaining states (Montana and Idaho) and for BLM Wilderness
will probably be enacted. The other roadless areas will be eliminated from
consideration. National Forest Management Plans emphasizing industrial
logging, grazing, mineral and energy development, road building, and motorized
recreation will be implemented. Conventional means of protecting these
millions of acres of wild country will largely dissipate. Judicial and
administrative appeals for their protection will be closed off. Congress will
turn a deaf ear to requests for additional Wildernesses so soon after disposing
of the thorny issue. Political lobbying by conservation groups to protect endangered
wildlands will cease to be effective. And in half a decade, the saw, 'dozer,
and drill will devastate most of what is unprotected. The battle for wilderness
will be over. Perhaps 3 percent of the United States will be more or less
protected and it will be open season on the rest. Unless ....

Many of the projects that will
destroy roadless areas are economically marginal. For example, some Forest
Service employees say that the construction costs for a low figure of 35,000
miles of roads in currently roadless areas will exceed $3 billion, while the
timber to which they will provide access is worth less than $500 million. It is
costly for the Forest Service, the BLM, timber companies, oil companies,
mining companies, and others to scratch out the "resources" in these
last wild areas. It is expensive to maintain the necessary infrastructure of
roads for the exploitation of wildlands. The cost of repairs, the hassle, the
delay, and the downtime may just be too much for the bureaucrats and
exploiters to accept if a widely-dispersed, unorganized, strategic movement of
resistance spreads across the land.

It is time for women and men, individually and in small
groups, to act heroically in defense of the wild, to put a monkeywrench into
the gears of the machine that is destroying natural diversity. Though illegal,
this strategic monkeywrenching can be safe, easy, fun, and—most
important—effective in stopping timber cutting, road building, overgrazing, oil
and gas exploration, mining, dam building, powerline construction,
off-road-vehicle use, trapping, ski area development, and other forms of
destruction of the wilderness, as well as cancerous suburban sprawl.

But it must be
strategic, it must be thoughtful, it must be deliberate in order to succeed.
Such a campaign of resistance would adhere to the following principles:

MONKEYWRENCHING IS NONVIOLENT

Monkeywrenching is
nonviolent resistance to the destruction of natural diversity and wilderness.
It is never directed against human beings or other forms of life. It is aimed
at inanimate machines and tools that are destroying life. Care is always taken
to minimize any possible threat to people, including the monkeywrenchers
themselves.

MONKEYWRENCHING
IS NOT ORGANIZED

There should be no central direction or organization to monkeywrenching. Any type of network would invite
infiltration, agents provocateurs, and repression. It is truly individual
action. Because of this, communication among monkeywrenchers is difficult and
dangerous. Anonymous discussion through this book and its future editions seems
to be the safest avenue of communication to refine techniques, security
procedures, and strategy.

MONKEYWRENCHING
IS INDIVIDUAL

Monkeywrenching is done by
individuals or very small groups of people who have known each other for years.
Trust and a good working relationship are essential in such groups. The more
people involved, the greater the dangers of infiltration or a loose mouth.
Monkeywrenchers avoid working with people they haven't known for a long time, those who can't keep their mouths closed, and those with grandiose or violent
ideas (they may be police agents or dangerous crackpots).

MONKEYWRENCHING
IS TARGETED

Ecodefenders pick their
targets. Mindless, erratic vandalism is counterproduuctive as well as
unethical. Monkeywrenchers know that they do not stop a specific logging sale
by destroying any piece of logging equipment, they come across. They make sure
it belongs to the real culprit. They ask themselves what is the most vulnerable
point of a wilderness-destroying project, and strike there. Senseless vandalism
leads to loss of popular sympathy.

MONKEYWRENCHING
IS TIMELY

There are proper times and places for monkeywrenching. There
are also times when monkeywrenching may be counterproductive. Monkeywrenchers
generally should not act when there is a nonviolent civil disobedience action e.g.,
a blockade-taking place against the opposed project. Monkeywrenching may cloud
the issue of direct action, and the blockaders could be blamed for the ecotage
and be put in danger from the work crew or police. Blockades and
monkeywrenching usually do not mix. Monkeywrenching may also not be appropriate
when delicate political negotiations are taking place for the protection of a
certain area. There are, of course, exceptions to this rule. The Earth warrior
always asks, Will monkeywrenching help or hinder the protection of this place?

MONKEYWRENCHING
IS DISPERSED

Monkeywrenching
is a widespread movement across the United States. Government agencies and
wilderness despoilers from Maine to Hawaii know that their destruction of
natural diversity may be resisted. Nationwide monkeywrenching will hasten
overall industrial retreat from wild areas.

MONKEYWRENCHING
IS DIVERSE

All kinds of people,
in all kinds of situations, can be monkeywrenchers. Some pick a large area of
wild country, declare it wilderness in their own minds, and resist any intrusion
into it. Others specialize against logging or ORVs in a variety of areas.
Certain monkeywrenchers may target a specific project, such as a giant
powerline, a road under construction, or an oil operation. Some operate in
their backyards, while others lie low at home and plan their ecotage a thousand
miles away. Some are loners, and others operate in small groups. Even
Republicans monkeywrench.

MONKEYWRENCHING
IS FUN

Although it is serious and
potentially dangerous, monkeywrenching is also fun. There is a rush of
excitement, a sense of accomplishment, and unparalleled camaraderie from
creeping about in the night resisting those "alien forces from Houston,
Tokyo, Washington, DC, and the Pentagon." As Ed Abbey said, "Enjoy, shipmates, enjoy."

MONKEYWRENCHING
IS NOT REVOLUTIONARY

Monkeywrenchers do not aim to overthrow any social, political, or economic system. Monkeywrenching is merely nonviolent self-defense of the wild. It is aimed at keeping industrial civilization out of natural areas and causing industry's retreat from areas that should be wild. It is not major industrial sabotage. Explosives, firearms,
and other dangerous tools are usually avoided; they invite greater scrutiny
from law enforcement agencies, repression, and loss of public support.

MONKEYWRENCHING
IS SIMPLE

The simplest
possible tool is used. The safest tactic is employed. Elaborate commando
operations are generally avoided. The most effective means for stopping the
destruction of the wild are often the simplest. There are times when more
detailed and complicated operations are necessary. But the monkeywrencher
asks, What is the simplest way to do this?

MONKEYWRENCHING
IS DELIBERATE AND ETHICAL

Monkeywrenchers are
very conscious of the gravity of what they do. They are deliberate about taking
such a serious step. They are thoughtful, not cavalier.
Monkeywrenchers—although nonviolent—are warriors. They are exposing themselves
to possible arrest or injury. It is not a casual or flippant affair. They keep a
pure heart and mind about it. They remember that they are engaged in the most
moral of all actions: protecting life, defending Earth.

A movement based on the above
principles could protect millions of acres of wilderness more stringently than
could any congressional act, could insure the propagation of the Grizzly and
other threatened life forms better than could an army of game wardens, and
could lead to the retreat of industrial civilization from large areas of
forest, mountain, desert, prairie, seashore, swamp, tundra, and woodland that
are better suited to the maintenance of native diversity than to the production
of raw materials for over consumptive technological human society.

If logging firms know that a
timber sale is spiked, they won't bid on the timber. If a Forest Supervisor
knows that a road will be continually destroyed, he won't try to build it. If
seismographers know that they will be constantly harassed in an area, they
won't go there. If ORVers know that they'll get flat tires miles from nowhere,
they won't drive in such areas.

John Muir said that if it ever came to a war between the
races, he would side with the bears. That day has arrived.

POSTSCRIPT
(1993)

Events in the years since the above was
originally written (1985) and revised (1990) have underscored its message:

~
The Supreme Court has severely
restricted "standing" for conservationists to sue the federal
government;

~
The Forest Service has tried to
deep-six its appeals process because forest defenders use it to slow timber
sales and road building in roadless areas;

~
Resource extraction industries
are gearing up for a major attack on the Endangered Species Act;

Powerful members of
Congress, at the encouragement of the timber industry and with the
acquiescence of some conservation groups, have slipped through legislative
"riders" preventing legal challenges to timber sales in roadless areas ...

The list goes on and on.

While public outcry from grass-roots conservationists has
turned some of these assaults on due process around, the last wildlands on the
public lands are under attack as never before. The final mopping-up action of
industrial society against the ecological richness of North America (and the
world) is now occurring. Yet ... our hands are tied only if we allow them to be
tied.